I had a MY25, which all were cursed with the faulty GHCA charger which meant that eventually the car cant charge at home on AC. We had ours break on day 3, and again a few days after getting it repaired. This was on top of a host of other smaller technical issues, like one of the headlights failing and buttons no longer responding. Since we are in CA, after 30 days we simply asked Volvo if we could do a buyback and they said yes. The newest part seems to resolve the issue, but I will note that our demo MY26 EX90 had the same issue so there is a reasonable chance that it may occur with a new car now.
That said, I definitely really liked the car. Out of all the 3 row EVs, it was the most “car-like” to drive and certainly the most fun. The Lucid and Vistiq had more HP on paper, but I found the ~450 HP trims to have plenty of zip to the drive. The Vistiq and Gravity were certainly fast enough but feel a lot heavier to drive, which may not necesarily be a bad thing since and as a passenger I feel less carsick in them as opposed to the EX90. The car does feel larger to drive (because it is a bit larger). My size feeling is EX90 < Ionic 9 < Vistiq < Gravity < R1S. So while I like driving the Vistiq I miss driving the EX90.
Comfort wise, the Vistiq is a much more traditional car with wider seats. Volvo has great seats, but there is something about American luxury that is quite comfortable. I do prefer that the Vistiq has more buttons, sure it looks more clean to not have rear window controls or mirror controls, but forcing everything in the touchscreen is annoying. Both are very quiet cars, but the Volvo is slightly queiter. I had an awful lot of reflections from things around the car in the EX90, whereas the Vistiq will reflect everything in front of you, but I find the Vistiq less annoying. The Volvo looks real nice, but some of the interior materials don’t hold up very well, in the few months of ownership there were a lot of rips and tears that I didnt have in my previous XC90. The components in the Vistiq feel much more substantial, the steering wheel is heavier, the turn signal locks into place instead of the free flowing-ness of the EX90, and the seats have very solid backs. I am guessing that the Vistiq will hold up better than the EX90 over the lease period.
The software is much better in the Volvo, there are far fewer settings but I didnt really feel the need to change them often. While both are based on android auto, the new Volvo UX is more like a 2020 smartphone UI while the Vistiq is more of a refined 2010 car UI. Not having Carplay sucks, but isnt as bad as I thought it was going to be. Gemini seems to be better integrated in the Vistiq, but the lack of Carplay really hurts for those of us with multiple drivers. That said, profile switching seems to work in the Vistiq, we never could get it working properly in the EX90.
The sound system is a thorny issue for me. We had the bose sound system in the EX90, which was good but notacibly worse than the Harmon Kardin that we had in our previous XC90. The recent update brought spatial audio, which improved it a bit, but it still sounded a bit muffled to us. The Vistiq comes with the AKG system which supports Dolby Atmos, but we don’t like it as much as the Volvo sound. Its good, but the sound really comes from the front of the car, and you need to turn it up a lot to hear the Atmos effects from the speakers in the back. Apparently this can get better with more tweaking of the equalizer, but the EX90 sounded good as is. The Bowers and Wilkens is supposed to be this amazing, life changing sound, but there are no EX90s in socal with that option according to Visor.vin. Since they havent started 2027 production, there aren’t going to be for a while. Honestly, if they made it part of the ultra trim standard it would probably have made me stick with it. Instead, it remains a legend.
That… was a lot. Apologies. Guess I had a lot to say about the cars. We are what you would call a “volvo” family, so it felt weird to go with the Vistiq, but we couldnt find any loaners for the EX90 nor could we get a good enough discount to make it cheaper than the Vistiq. Even though I ended up with the premium trim, I am still paying less than I would be for an EX90 with similar features. Also, the residuals on the Vistiq are absurdly high, so a 2 year lease is an option as opposed to Volvo. We have had some annoying software glitches with our Vistiq, but its way better than what we were seeing with the EX90 where we would have almost daily fake errors that sounded scary, a microphone that would give out every few days requiring an infotainment reset, and a camera that would sporadically not work. This all said, had we been able to get a bit better deal we probably would have stuck with it. That maybe says more than all that text I wrote.
